From the Other Side

In a 1972 survey of science fiction in The New Yorker, the critic Gerald Jonas mentioned Le Guin only in passing, noting the cultish veneration that undergraduates at the time felt for “The Left Hand of Darkness.” Eight years later, however, Le Guin got the full treatment when her novel “The Beginning Place” was the lead item in a Books piece by John Updike. Updike began by offering this overview of Le Guin’s career:

Ursula K. Le Guin has for fifteen years been familiar to devotees of science fiction, but only recently has her reputation, passing through the same cultural space warp utilized by Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, entered what is hailed from the other side as “mainstream fiction.” Her writing, even when under the exclusive aegis of Ace books and Amazing Stories, has a mainstream tact, color, and intelligence.

By that time, Le Guin had also begun publishing in The New Yorker. Her first story in the magazine, “Two Delays on the Northern Line,” appeared in 1979 and was followed by nine more in the next eleven years. (Registered subscribers have access to

The life we had led at home, though in its own way strenuous, had not fitted any of us for the kind of strain met with in sledge-hauling at ten or twenty degrees below freezing.